Motivation is Hard

Well, I'm finally done my first year of university! I'm back at home living with my family, I can spend more time streaming and doing speedrun attempts, and I don't have any sort of school or work obligations! Sounds like a dream, right?

It really isn't.

I can safely say that 99.9% of people 18+ reading this have experienced this, and I had heard all about it when I was in high school. But seeing your friends and classmates go into the "real world" working summer jobs and studying hard, it really makes you feel like shit and you constantly question whether you are actually useful or doing enough. I question all the time whether I've actually become a functional member of society at all yet, and I know everyone has/will experience this at some point in their life, but it's one thing to hear about it and another thing to experience it.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and one big difference between me and most people around me is motivation. I'm not really saying that other people have more inherent motivation than me either, it's more than I have experienced a severe lack of external motivation in my life. I feel like most people are externally motivated by 2 things, their schools and their parents (and their coaches if they do sports). And honestly, in every one of those areas I've experienced a severe lack of motivation.

I've always been good at school, even when I was 5 years old. Teachers always praised me because I was able to understand concepts very easily, and I never caused trouble. The problem with being so smart is that I was never pushed to my limits. Until grade 11, I never had a class which challenged me, or made me put a lot of my effort. Even now, I've never had a class that made me put in 100% of my effort to get through. I've never really learned how to properly study, and while I'm doing fine for now, I can't keep this up forever. And when the time comes where I will really be challenged by school, will anyone or anything be motivating me to adapt?

My parents were a lot more pushy with my older brother than they were with me. My older brother would get yelled at and scolded way more often than I ever have. There was a problem however, my parents would get upset with my brother for even small things. So my brother learned to just stop trying at all, because he would be scolded no matter what. I experienced a little bit of this in my very young childhood, however as a got a little older, my parents realized that they should be more lax, however the opposite problem now arose. I feel that my parents never taught me basic life skills, like cooking, cleaning, etc. Furthermore, because everyone in my immediate family is even more introverted than I am, I've never had a good model for how to be social, or how to form relationships properly at all.

I did gymnastics for many years, and my coach (a 60+ year old Yugoslavian man) perhaps motivated me the most, although it was definitely not perfect. When I first started gymnastics I was REALLY bad. Like unbelievably bad. My coach yelled at me a lot, and that was really the first time I learned that things aren't always gonna go my way. But I naturally began to try to become better, and after a little bit of time I became pretty good. The problem was that over the years, as more and more younger kids entered our group, my coach pushed me less and less until it felt like having a coach with me was totally pointless. After I became decent enough to do somewhat okay, no one else was motivating me to become great at gymnastics other than myself.

I didn't mention this at the beginning, but also at my old job, I felt like I was not being motivated enough. For those who don't know, I worked as a gymnastics coach for about 2.5 years. At first I really liked doing it, but as time went on, I felt like I hated being there more and more until I eventually quit in the middle of my grade 12 year. I had the knowledge to become a gymnastics coach, but I was missing the ability to really connect with the children which I taught, and to really have them enjoy their time there. What annoyed me though was that my boss acted like I was doing a great job, when I know that I wasn't. That really, really, really frustrated me, because I felt like if my boss felt that this was acceptable work, then it would be hard for me to really grow in that environment.

I feel like a lot of people might tell me that I need to motivate myself, and that it comes from within or something to that effect. And I agree that you need a certain level of self-discipline to really achieve what you want. However, it's so fucking hard to do anything when no one is there telling you to work harder, and to push yourself to your maximum. One of the key traits I'm looking for in a life partner is someone who pushes me to do my absolute best, because right now I'm totally stagnating, and constantly feeling like I could be doing so much more than I really am.